Integrating Custom Effects

Whats mine is yours, whats yours is mine!

When the need arises to create a custom action & custom effects, Auto-Entity can still help you reduce your workload. It may be that you can integrate your actions, effects and data with Auto-Entity managed state, so long as the data is compatible.

Custom Action

As a simple example, you may wish to create a custom action for handling type-ahead lookups that search a given entity.

customer.actions.ts

export const SearchCustomers = createAction(
  '[Customer] Typeahead Search',
  props<{criteria: string }>()
);

Custom Effect

You could then implement your own effect for handling this action to ensure the proper implementation and behavior:

customer.effects.ts

import {Actions, createEffect} from '@ngrx/effects';
import {LoadAllSuccess, LoadAllFailure} from '@briebug/ngrx-auto-entity';
import {SearchCustomers} from 'state/customer.actions';

export class CustomerEffects {
    searchCustomers$ = createEffect(() => this.actions$.pipe(
        ofType(SearchCustomers),
        map(action => action.criteria),
        switchMap(criteria => 
            this.customerService.search(criteria).pipe(
                map(result => new LoadAllSuccess(Customer, result)),
                catchError(err => of(new LoadAllFailure(Customer, err)))
            ))
    ));
    
    constructor(private actions$: Actions, private customerService: CustomerService) {}
}

In this case, we need switchMap semantics...that is, we wish to cancel any previous requests that may have stale information in order to utilize the most up to date search criteria the user may have entered.

By default, Auto-Entity uses mergeMap for all effects, which may not always be the most appropriate mapper for the use case.

Integrate into Auto-Entity Managed State

Take note, however, of the new actions returned by this effect:

this.customerService.search(criteria).pipe(
    map(result => new LoadAllSuccess(Customer, result)),
    catchError(err => of(new LoadAllFailure(Customer, err)))
))

We are returning generic actions! Since these are customers, as long as we have built auto-entity state for the Customer entity, you may combine custom actions you implement yourself with generic actions from the Auto-Entity library.

These actions will ultimately cause the returned customer search results to be reduced into state managed by Auto-Entity for you. You only have to create just one action. Just make sure the shape of the data returned by your custom service is compatible, or is otherwise transformed into a compatible shape.